


My Brain Hurts A Lot

by sapling



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, everyone's in their mid-20s, kenny's a trans girl, no one's good at emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 07:01:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14373420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapling/pseuds/sapling
Summary: It's been six months since the first reported case of the sickness, Kenny goes to Kyle to restore order.





	My Brain Hurts A Lot

**Author's Note:**

> listen to david bowie's "five years" it's a good song, an apocalyptic classic.

Through the chainlink fence that marked the perimeter of the camp, the remaining structures that stood beared awful resemblance to the town he grew up in. He recognized the four-way intersection towards the bottom of the hill, the disgusting pizza parlor they slinked off to when it was well past midnight, the hardware store right across the way, all of which were now free of traffic and barren of any sign of life and only that there used to be. The town didn’t grow, not that much around the time he left aside from a few new stores and a handful of neighbors that inevitably left once it proved to be too quiet for their liking. To his surprise, he found he’d gotten used to the quiet his home offered him once he escaped east, though experiencing it again in this manner and circumstance left no room for ‘rejuvenation’ or whatever people called it when returning back to their old stomping grounds.

For the most part everything looked _exactly_ the same in the daylight, and it shouldn’t have. There was hardly any indication that only an hour away an entire city was left in the ashes of its own population left to rot. What was once regarded as a downside, the town’s nature of being unaffected by the tides the rest of the country fell in and opting to being stuck in some sort of a time capsule no matter the amount of effort put into changing: it proved to be the last line of defense. A thumping pain about his face and side, the aching of his fingers and raw injury, these turned into merely background noise against the contradictory landscape that lay before him.

Suddenly, there came a shuffling of footsteps against leftover snowfall behind Kyle that pulled him from his trance and sent him into a brief panic, only allowing himself to exhale the moment he recognized her.

In usual fashion, Kenny ignored his state and seemed far more interested in what was beyond the fence, though she frowned in confusion when she saw nothing significant, “…you lookin’ for something?”

He hesitated, peering up at her from the sharp incline, “Not particularly.”

The woman gave a small hum as she invited herself to join and carefully made her way down the incline. Her person was still disheveled from the commotion earlier, part of her was damp and so was most of her pants leg as if she’d taken another tumble since. Nowadays not being able to keep up with appearance couldn’t be helped as right fitting clothes were just as scarce as kind faces; on his first day at the compound, Kenny teased that she finally fit in with her oversized jacket and dirty sweats adjusted with a dead man’s shoestring. Blue, he decided, looked jarring on her as opposed to orange.

Before he could object to returning to camp or apologizing, she then casually produced a pack of Marlboros from her pocket, “Got something for you.”

He raised an eyebrow, “What’s this?”

“Peace offering,” Kenny held the pack in front of him, her bandaged hand stuck in her other pocket. She nudged again and shook the carton, the rattling inside said there was only a handful left, “Come on man, Craig’s just…emotional.”

The welt circling his cheek stung just a bit more, “Thanks, I couldn’t tell. He didn’t just hand you these, did he?”

She gave a mischievous smile before shaking her head in response—the only sort of permission he needed to take them, and he did so with satisfaction. The lighter in his pocket that went unused for weeks he fished out, replacing it with the half-empty pack in one swift motion. Kyle winced as his knuckles brushed against the inner fabric of his jeans, a lovely reminder pushed through to the forefront of his mind that in this world any slight cut or scrape could prove fatal and it’d be in his best interest to take care of it with more than just the piece of cloth he tore from his sleeve.  

The first drag he took brought with it a sense of normalcy he’d forgotten was even tangible, and the quiet that came after didn’t spell disaster. To his right, Kenny held him in her peripheral and watched the way Kyle’s shoulders no longer had their usual tension, how stupidly fitting his bruises complimented the whole affair and that he’d gotten them in the first place by simply being too stubborn to be wrong.

 “Junior year, seems like forever ago” she began, letting her eyes fall on the outer fence. With her bandaged hand, she pointed towards the east beyond the perimeter, “We were riiight over there, where all that smoke’s comin’ from.”

“It _was_ forever ago, what about it.” High school wasn’t a subject he dwelled on or remembered fondly whenever being forced to recall it in any capacity even though it was insignificant now along with the rest of the previous successes and failures of the surviving population.

“When you got your acceptance letter.” She lowered her arm, still watching black smoke bellow like a late warning, remnant of a fire she’d bet the rest of her belongings was started by the living, “We were all there somehow, and here you come in—happiest motherfucker I’d ever seen.”

Kyle paused before a faint smile crept upon his face, his defense lowering, “Right. You asked if I had ‘finally’ gotten laid.”

“I didn’t ask it like that.”

“I’m not repeating what you said, dick.” Only then did he turn to look at the building, only a dot in the distance mostly obscured by the sun shining behind it and the smoke enveloping its structure. Though far and certainly destroyed, a sense that Kyle wasn’t far away enough from the school for comfort still plagued him. Graduation came and went without much fanfare and was utterly anticlimactic, surrounded by people he’d been with since diapers yet somehow fully accepting months prior that they’d all be strangers to him in a year save for a select few. It felt as if that process of detachment from those sure to remain and renouncement from which he came was in full swing by the time he walked across the laminate wood flooring in a dingy gymnasium to receive his ticket to somewhere.

He couldn’t run fast enough the days leading up to his move east, “Seriously, what about it?”

“We got shitfaced, and I remember you vowing to never come back to this town.” Kenny gave a small laugh once more, her gaze now refusing to tear away from the smoldering building, “Promised a thousand times you were gonna stay on the east coast. ‘ _Fuck Denver’_ , ‘ _Fuck Boulder_ ’, fuck the whole goddamn state—you wouldn’t stop repeatin’ yourself ‘till you passed out.”

The smile on his face fell just as quickly as it appeared. Not a recent revelation to him in any sense of the words but he spent the last two weeks exerting every bit of energy he could muster to crawl right back where he started. Though no fault of his own and necessary for his own survival, it wasn’t any less cruel. Almost vindictive even, “What do you want me to say, ‘ _Sorry for leaving you behind_ ’?”

“I’m not the one you need to be sayin’ sorry to, first of all. Stan was the one all broken up when you ditched,” Kenny was a natural diffuser of a person and she served no different even on the outskirts of their makeshift compound. He knew she wasn’t one for complaints but now while the human race was going extinct that mechanism came off as inappropriately nonchalant, something that could either strain relationships or kill her.

It worried him, annoyed him immensely. She didn’t care.

“Second of all—you didn’t leave behind nobody. ‘Sides, the fuck were you gonna do sitting around here? You had to.” A silence passed between the two of them before she continued, “It sucks, y’know? That the world went to shit. That you’re here, back in South Park of all places.”

His jaw twitched, “If I didn’t know any better you just came over here just to bum me out—"

“When mother nature stops tryin’ to get rid of us, I know you’re gonna give this place some well-deserved hell. You already figured that part out, that we need to let this _.. thing_ , whatever the fuck this is, run its course.” Kenny cut him off, unbothered by his tone and she ashed the ground beneath her, “Chill and let everybody else catch up.”

Another pause.

“…you mean ‘ _if_.” He took another drag, allowing the smoke to fill his lungs holding it for some time before he exhaled, tobacco mixing with the cold. “That’s the operative word, and I’m certain I have the gist right of everything I saw, everything I heard on the base and…”

Kyle’s voice and train of thought trailed off into the wind, his eyes lowering as his vision was replaced with images from the overrun military compound he was forced to leave by foot into no man’s land. He bit his tongue, swallowing the rest of his words as they were all merely hypotheticals having already been repeated to death and for the sake of hearing oneself talk, nothing more.

“I haven’t figured out anything,” he watched the embers slowly die between his fingers and rolled back his shoulders, “…I just want to focus on surviving until tomorrow, alright? None of this…none of extra shit, Kenny. We have to be on the same page or we’re not going to last long out here.”

She pursed her lips before shrugging, “Maybe not fuckin’ squaring off with Tucker would be a good start—”

“Craig is going to get us all killed letting Tweek stay here; he’s _infected,_ we both saw where he got bit, just because he’s not showing any fever symptoms doesn’t make him any less of a threat! We left plenty of people behind on our way up, and now _all of a sudden_ he gives a fuck about someone dying— _don’t cut me off again_ ,” he warned just as Kenny began to open her mouth, “He can’t keep it a secret, he knows what needs to be done with him and he’s acting like he’s in the fourth grade all over again.”

Kenny snorted, “I just stole cigarettes from the guy for you like three seconds ago! You don’t gotta run this by me, promise.”

“What are you laughing at?”

“You.”

His pulse quickened as the wind picked up and circled around his person causing him to shiver, “This isn’t funny. Are you fucking with me right now?”

“No! No, Ky. I know that, I know it’s not,” her attitude masked her frustration as seamless as breathing and it was all pointed towards herself.  She avoided him as well as she could ever since Kyle arrived at the compound accompanied by the group he picked up from the military base, and now here she was unable to stop herself from holding conversation. Just as he, Kenny grew to prefer silence even though her entire life up until that point was chaotic, this only added to the ever-growing pile of disarray. For the first time she was faced with an uncertainty which began and ended with him, so she intended to not further complicate things with talking too much. Pissing him off wasn’t on that agenda.

She frowned, half set on tossing the cigarette away but decided on taking another drag, “I’m doin’ a real shit job at this. Forget it—what I said.”

Kyle blinked at her as best as he could with a growing black eye, squinting against the sun. He could only appreciate to a certain degree that she was the only one who bothered to leave for the outskirts of camp to find him, presumably to bring him back. He’d initially went to clear his head but that was short of impossible now, “Dunno what you meant to be accomplished here, but fine.”

_‘That makes two of us’_ should’ve been the next string of words to come out of her mouth followed by her immediate departure and trek up the hill, what came instead was nothing close, “We need you.”

How absolutely _vital_ Kyle was, it wasn’t a collective sentiment by far save for those who remembered him fondly and those who didn’t, but Kenny’s truth still lay there hidden enough to comfortably admit this to his face. Meanwhile, his features softened and exposed his weariness along all of what came with it; his eyes flickered away a second too long and his responses, reflexes—late. She didn’t intend it, but the idea of being needed after the scene he caused sounded fake, a meaningful attempt to convince him to return before the sun went down, but fake.

A minute or two passed before he broke it, “Is that it? Not gonna drag me back?”

“Yeah…think so.” her lips turned upward only enough to where it could be interpreted as a smile, a sad one, but a smile nevertheless, “I’m glad I got to see you again. Alive _,_ I mean.”

Kyle threw his cigarette in the direction of the fence, watching the wind catch it, nearly taking it to the other side of the boundary before offering a half-hearted shrug.

“Me too.”

 


End file.
